Does China Have a Social Credit System? Part I

Some analysis of scholarly studies

Wikipedia: 10^th Panchen Lama of Tibet during a ‘struggle session' in Maoist China, 1964

I’m guessing the reason that the UK Column decided to onboard a China-maxxer^[i] at the beginning of the year is that, like the BBC, they believe in ‘balanced’ reporting. Even I have to admit that after a while it gets a bit tiresome being unbalanced and Anti-Everything, like me. (See my long Anti-Everything list at the end of the last piece I did.) Having a site that is anti some things and pro other things provides a big tent where there’s something for everyone, but I just don’t seem to be grown-up enough to do it.

The UK Column’s resident China-maxxer has recently declared that Social Credit Scores are a Western invention. The emphasis of the denial seems to be on scores and not the Social Credit System itself. Is there a Chinese Social Credit System (SCS) with scores? Is there a Chinese Social Credit System sans scores? Is the whole thing a fiction? If so, that poses a slight problem for those in the not-so-China-maxxing camp because the not-so-China-maxxers do tend to bang on about the Chinese SCS, avec scores and all.

So what’s the score with the alleged Chinese SCS? Now that the dust appears to have settled (for now) on the UK Column’s China-maxxing debacle, one very simple question keeps bubbling to the surface of my mind: what reliable evidence is there for the existence of an SCS in China, with or without scoring?

This question really ought not to rank alongside the great metaphysical mysteries such as: is there a God? What is the source of consciousness? Who really penned the works of ‘William Shakespeare’? So I did some research into the Great SCS Question with the aim of reclassifying it from an ontological mystery to a solved bureaucratic riddle. I’m not certain that I’ve succeeded, but I thought it would be churlish of me not to share my ramblings on the subject so that you can judge for yourself.

The research I will reference comprises mainly scholarly studies peppered with evidence from other sources, including Human Rights Watch, and Wall Street Journal Normies Josh Chin and Liza Lin. I do not assert the findings to be The Truth, The Whole Truth, and Nothing But The Truth simply because they are from “scholarly studies”. We all know how disappointing scholarly studies can be. I do believe that the studies provide some insights, but they don’t tell the whole story.

Before I begin, I want readers to understand that this assignment was not easy. While I was able to find some studies that were coherent, I had to wade through a fair bit of this kind of quicksand to get there:

“Authority operates through the visible apparatus of the state alongside the subtle orchestration of conduct, through which governmental rationalities become sedimented across the quotidian routines of social existence.”

No, I did not make that up – that was a real sentence in a real study.

I also learnt that if an academic paper on this subject does not have the word “normative” in it, then it stands a fairly good chance of being comprehensible. I have concluded that this is one word of perhaps many that an academic uses to say, “I’m an academic, and I know what I’m doing.” To which they could add: “This paper is going to be inscrutable, but if you’re not prepared to grapple with its inscrutability in your quest for knowledge, then you are not ready for these pearls of wisdom.” Which, when you get right down to it, is the academic version of: “When you can take the pebble from my hand, it will be time for you to leave.”

In short, I am still recovering from academese, so please spare a thought for me as you read this piece. Or rather, please orchestrate your quotidian routines of social existence in a manner that sediments sympathy for the pains endured by me in my exploration of subtle academic rationalities concerning the study of the visible apparatus of the CCP’s alleged authoritarianism.

The structure of this two-part essay is as follows:

Part I covers a discussion of:

• The background to the Chinese Social Credit System (SCS) with emphasis on Chinese government policy statements and documents. Here, I reference a scholarly study by Rogier Creemers (University of Leiden).

• A compelling Stanford University study evidencing an SCS with a scoring system.

• A China-maxxer’s view of the Stanford study.

In Part II, I’ll discuss:

• Evidence of SCS activity relating to policing online ‘disinformation’.

• A scholarly study evidencing the existence of Corporate Social Credit Systems (CSCS) with a scoring system.

• How the suppression of Xinjiang’s Uyghurs accelerated the Chinese surveillance state.

• Some recent updates of the SCS position, dealing with claims and counter claims of alleged myths in the West about the system.

• My concluding thoughts.

Background to the Chinese Social Credit System (shehui xinyong tixi) with reference to Chinese government policy and relevant Party documents

The idea of a Chinese SCS was hatched in the 1990s, ostensibly as an attempt by the CCP leadership to develop personal banking and credit rating systems to mitigate systemic financial risk in the economy. By all accounts, the scope of the project was expanded to address a perceived societal-wide moral collapse in the post-Mao era in the wake of turbulent economic and social changes attributed to China’s opening up to Western investment in 1978. Trustworthiness and restoring morality became memes that gained currency in the SCS policy arena.

While a financially oriented credit risk management system was certainly a priority for Party leaders, it is unlikely, in my view, that a puritanical obsession with improving morality sought expression in the design of a high-tech bureaucratic behavioural management system. It is more likely that the expansion of the SCS’s scope was driven by the political leadership’s anxiety over the need to manage the inherent unpredictability of a complex society undergoing rapid social and economic change. The prospect of an increasingly rapid exchange of ideas with the outside world, made possible by the emerging internet, must have only heightened the leadership’s anxiety over threats to power.

Thus, by October 2011, and with confidence in the leadership at low levels among the emerging middle class, the official readout of a Party senior leadership meeting framed a new goal of the SCS as “the establishment and perfection of a credit system covering the entirety of society.”^[ii] [emphasis added] Lin Junyue, an American-educated expert in credit systems at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, led the SCS project in its early days. Lin reiterated the preoccupation with morality, saying:

“China doesn’t have churches to enforce morality. You can’t rely just on education. If all you do is lecture people, saying ‘This is how you should do it’, or ‘This way is immoral’, you’re not going to get good results.”^[iii]

He added that the SCS mechanism of real-world rewards and punishments “makes the moral construction process a little more efficient.” In 2016, he told the authors of Surveillance State: Inside China’s Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control^[iv]:

“With the Social Credit System it’s there every day at every moment, it’s in every corner of every business and household, recording data. If you do well, it rewards you. And if you’re doing something bad, maybe not to the point of breaking the law, you get a warning about your problems. … It’s a great service.” [emphasis added]

So, we see definite clues from one of the system’s chief designers about its true purpose. We will uncover more of these clues, but for now I will say that the potential murkiness of the definition of “social credit” affords some degree of cover for SCS apologists attempting to deny accusations of a data-driven behaviour control system. This is why it is important to understand the designers’ and policymakers’ view of the term, as described above, and more of which shortly.

I would also add that the potential murkiness of the concept of social credit works in favour of Chinese state planners since, if their intention is to have at their disposal a highly flexible digital tool for managing social behaviour, its appealing moral and civic overtones disguise cruder political control objectives.

I will now dissect a 2018 report by Rogier Creemers (University of Leiden) titled “China’s Social Credit System: An Evolving Practice of Control”. In his paper, Creemers explains the thinking and design processes behind the SCS with reference to Chinese language source material, combined with field visits to China.

Let’s begin where we left off by getting a better understanding of the Chinese perspective of Social Credit. Creemers informs us that^[v]:

“the Mandarin term “credit” (xinyong) carries a wider meaning than its English-language counterpart. It not only includes notions of financial ability to service debt, but is cognate with terms for sincerity, honesty, and integrity.”

In this regard, Creemers cites the Chinese State Council’s “Planning Outline for the Construction of a Social Credit System (2014-2020)” as “the most authoritative blueprint for subsequent SCS efforts”, and quotes an objective directly from the document as follows:

“its inherent requirements are establishing the idea of a sincerity culture, and promoting honesty and traditional virtues, it uses encouragement for trustworthiness and constraints against untrustworthiness as incentive mechanisms, and its objective is raising the sincerity consciousness and credit levels of the entire society.”

Creemer’s interpretation, with which I concur in light of the Stanford Study I will be discussing in the next section, is that “the SCS is framed as a set of mechanisms providing rewards or punishments as feedback to actors, based not just on the lawfulness, but also the morality of their actions, covering economic, social and political conduct.”^[vi] [emphasis added]

Creemers’ interpretation is supported by Clause 1 of The Social Credit System Construction Law of the People’s Republic of China, which is still in the draft stage^[vii]:

“The state establishes and perfects a system of incentives for trustworthiness and punishments for dishonesty, promoting and praising honesty and trustworthiness, and legally punishing and restraining dishonest behaviour.”

Further evidence of the Chinese state’s intent to codify and enforce moral and civic virtue can be found in a statement made by Xi Jinping in 2020^[viii]:

“We should integrate the core socialist values into the construction of the rule of law, improve the long-term mechanism for building integrity, increase the punishment of behaviours such as lack of public morality and lack of integrity, and strive to form a good social atmosphere and social order.”

As already noted, the SCS grew out of efforts from the 1990s onwards to instil financial trust in the marketplace as far-reaching economic reforms were taking shape. Creemers alludes to mission creep as the leadership began to see its attractiveness in other areas of governance:

“the linkage between [financial] credit and social management started being explored in local initiatives… Perhaps the best-reported example, however, is the county of Suining, in Jiangsu province. In 2010, Suining introduced a “mass credit” (dazhong xinyong) programme, which measured and scored individual conduct. Citizens were given 1000 credit points to start with. Points could be deducted for infringement of specific legal, administrative and moral norms… On the basis of the resulting scores, citizens were categorized from A to D. While A-class citizens would be granted preferential access to employment opportunities, lower-ranked citizens were to face increasing levels of scrutiny when undergoing particular examination requirements… The Suining government created a public record of the points their [sic] deducted, listing culprits’ names and actions.” [emphasis added]

The Suining trial was in fact aborted owing to popular protest. It is therefore important to note Creemers’ observation regarding the limitations faced by the CCP in its roll-out of an SCS: it faces no meaningful legal constraints and, in that sense, it can do anything. But it cannot do everything, since rejection and popular protest by Chinese citizens pose real constraints.

According to Creemers, the result of this mission creep is that “the fundamental objective of the SCS is instituting cybernetic mechanisms of behavioural control, where individuals and organizations are monitored in order to automatically confront them with the consequences of their actions.” Here we see the application of the panopticon principle of surveillance, which posits that the individual cannot be certain that they are being watched all the time, but assumes a degree of surveillance that makes self-policing almost inevitable. However, the ambition of the Chinese SCS seems to take this a step further – the state’s ability to mine oceans of personal data for transgressions and to share transgressions publicly, in real time, introduces the certainty that everyone is being watched all the time.

Creemers sets the scene with his interpretation of how the Chinese legal system has evolved within the overall state governance structure. Much of the 20^th century for China was characterised by a deficit of stable domestic governance across the entire Chinese territory, and “the first three decades of Communist Party rule were characterised by legal nihilism and continued turmoil.” It was only after the death of Mao in 1976 when a rebuilding of the Chinese legal system began in earnest. In that process, the flexibility of the vanguard Party has been prioritised. Creemers notes that “the 2014 4th Plenum clearly affirmed Party leadership over the legal system, while the doctrine of the “Three Supremes” (sange zhishang) requires the judiciary to first and foremost observe the supremacy of the Party’s cause.”

This evolution has had two primary effects on the interaction between Chinese law and the state. Firstly, the state views one of its duties as fostering social morality, and the legal system as a means to that end. Secondly, and flowing from the first, the boundary between state and society is blurred as the state fulfils its aim of a holistic and scientific approach to social engineering.

With regards to the preoccupation with morality, my perspective is that the Chinese state is no different to any other state in that its primary purpose is to manage the interests of a ruling class, which includes high-ranking state apparatchiks. An overarching interest of any national ruling class is behavioural control of the population and, to the extent that morality is an effective control narrative in China, this appears to be rooted in historical cultural norms. Running alongside that is the perceived deficit of trust in society brought about by the Chinese state’s rapid drive towards modernisation since 1978 under a state capitalist framework.

Leveraging morality for social control purposes is hardly a new phenomenon, either for the Chinese state or the Western political system. For centuries in China “the only path to officialdom lay through an examination system based on a canon of Confucian texts, which posited virtue as the central element of governing the person, the family, the region and the empire”^[ix], while the church and state in the West were fused for centuries before an uncoupling began in the 18^th century.

In the post-war era, the West has turned to media control and propaganda as an effective method of population control. Western populations are no longer able to discern truth from fiction, and are therefore putty in the hands of the ruling class. However, as the avalanche of lies and propaganda has perhaps begun to lose some of its power over the last 20 years, the West’s political ruling class has started to mimic the Chinese reliance on psychological manipulation using moral messaging to manipulate public sentiment. This was used to great effect during the Covid psychological operation, while invoking ‘harm’ to adults and children has lubricated the passage of legislation promoting censorship and digital ID controls across the West.

Whereas Chinese cultural attitudes to social cohesion permit a blatantly paternalistic deployment of “Social Credit” narratives as a means of psychological manipulation, the West has increasingly relied on the more insidious social control techniques of gamification^[x] and nudging, which, as Creemers points out, are supposed to be unnoticeable – “individuals are steered through the exploitation of inherent biases and unconscious decision-making strategies”^[xi]. The Chinese SCS certainly has a significant element of gamification to it, but a comparison of the different social control techniques in China and the West merely highlights how planners must attend to cultural specificity to ensure their success.

Returning to the Chinese SCS, the Joint Punishment System, outlined in the CCP’s Planning Outline document is noteworthy. Creemers tells us that:

“The principle behind punishments was disproportional sanction, as summarized in the phrase ‘if trust is broken in one place, restrictions are imposed everywhere’. The programme is based on a blacklist system: identified miscreants are entered on a published list, which means they are blocked from specific activities. The first area where this mechanism was implemented, and still the most wide-ranging one, is the punishment system for ‘untrustworthy persons subject to enforcement’ (shixin bei zhixing ren), which addresses non-performance of legally binding judgments. Subsequently, individual departments started developing their own, more focused blacklist systems for their own policy areas... Following the initial experience with punishment for failure to perform court judgments, the blacklist scheme was expanded to include the broader administrative apparatus. Individual ministries started publishing separate systems for blacklisting within their own jurisdictions…” [emphasis added]

Creemers goes on to list offences typically included for blacklisting, most of which appear to be the sort of behaviour that might warrant classification as a crime. However, at the core of the system is its operation outside of a more rigorous legal system subject to due process. It is highly flexible and therefore subject to almost instant policy changes. Thus, Creemers tells us that “Shenzhen installed facial recognition cameras and listed repeatedly caught jaywalkers”, and “news media and institutions such as Human Rights Watch identified cases where individuals who had been politically active had been listed without proper notification, and without apparent recourse to appeals procedures.” [emphasis added]

Social Credit Systems developed by private tech businesses are also part of the SCS landscape. “Sesame Credit combines elements of a traditional credit scoring system with components of a loyalty scheme.” In addition to its more traditional credit scoring data categories, there is a scoring category for “social relationships, referring [to] the extent to which one interacts with good friends and behaves in a friendly manner on the platform.” There is a lack of transparency about how specific actions alter one’s score, and speculation about Sesame’s alleged invasiveness and propensity for behavioural control was fuelled when a Technology director “suggested in a press interview that persons buying nappies would be seen as more trustworthy [than] someone playing video games for ten hours per day.”

It is important to put all of this into perspective by noting Creemers’ conclusions. As of 2018, the SCS was not a single integrated entity and could not be portrayed as the Orwellian dystopia conjured by some sections of the Western media. Despite the clear policy objective to implement technological systems to serve the dual role of a financial and wider monitoring system of ‘trustworthiness’, its primary role at the date of Creemers’ report was in the arena of combatting fraud and generally enhancing confidence in commerce. However, Creemers has evidenced how this goal has not remained bounded, and the reality is that:

“Party ideology still fundamentally believes in social engineering on the basis of system science, on the malleability and transformability of the individual, and a rather maximalist approach to social intervention that sees this reading of the SCS as an attractive vision. Not only the SCS plan, but also national big data and artificial intelligence strategies explicitly intend the expanded use of automated, data-based systems for social control.”

While serving to confirm the existence of an SCS with a stated objective of extra-legal social management, Creemers’ report provides a balanced perspective of the scope of China’s SCS and its evolution.

Stanford University – Assessing China’s National Model Social Credit System. Updated 15 July 2025. (Hereafter referred to as the Stanford study)^[xii]. (PDF version.)^[xiii]

This study begins with an overview of the structure of China’s social credit system (SCS):

“According to official documents, China’s social credit systems are designed to augment social governance by promoting order, encouraging “civilized” behavior, and expanding government oversight where legal tools fall short. Rather than a single unified system, China’s social credit systems are comprised of multiple experiments run by different agencies. These can be categorized into four types: (1) blacklists for serious legal violations; (2) a government-run financial credit report system; (3) commercial credit systems from tech firms that use algorithms to predict creditworthiness; and (4) city government-run systems that collect data on behavior and combine rewards and punishments.”

The first sentence is important since the authors are characterising China’s SCS using the CCP’s own official documentation. Unless we believe that the study authors have been dishonest or misinterpreted the official documents, the wording of the study clearly describes a social credit system that is more expansive than a mere credit rating system. This accords with the earlier Creemers study covered in the previous section.

The explanation also makes clear that it is not a unified system. The emphasis of the systems also varies from financial behaviour to social behaviour. The Stanford study focuses on the fourth category: “government-run systems that collect data on behavior and combine rewards and punishments.” The study informs us that “out of about 330 cities in China, 19 have such local systems.”

This study homes in on a city in the northeast of China with a population of one million. The city has been anonymised as “Meritown”. Further research into this indicates that the reason for anonymisation by the researchers was to protect the identity of bureaucrats and residents who were interviewed. However, it appears to be possible to identify the actual city by reference to the official documents and data used by the researchers.

The SCS in this city scores people according to 389 rules, 124 of which reward good behaviour, and 265 of which punish bad behaviour. According to the study authors, “66% of offenses…already fall under established laws and regulations. Others expand local government authority into moral and social domains beyond the law.” [emphasis added]

The source data for the analysis is:

“the 2019 Regulation of Meritown Society Members’ Social Credit and Evaluation, which defines the rules and scoring metric of the system. The authors also analyzed 45 additional Meritown policy documents referencing credit (xinyong) and supplemented this with fieldwork conducted between 2019 and 2022, including participatory observation in three communities and over 100 interviews with residents and officials. They use the Ministry of Justice of the People’s Republic of China Law and Regulation database and the China Law and Regulation Database to determine whether a Meritown SCS indicator was already legally sanctioned.” [emphasis added]

The study goes on to note that:

“The system gives every adult in Meritown a social credit score tied to their national ID, starting at 1,000 points (level A). It draws data from agencies like traffic police and banks and relies on village and residential committee staff to report everyday behaviors, such as trash disposal. The system scores people using 389 rules — 124 reward good behavior, 265 punish bad — and classifies them into eight levels (AAA to D). Perks like heating bill discounts go to top scorers (AAA), while those rated D face police monitoring. Scores change over time and can be appealed online. Researchers grouped punishable actions into six types: political, economic, disorderly conduct, moral and ethical, defying authority, and unspecified punishment. The researchers grouped positive behaviors into five areas: donations, volunteer work, governmental work, social honor, and reporting problems. ” [emphasis added]

Also noteworthy:

“the system also allows local authorities to act more flexibly than the law, adapting the scoring system to shifting policy priorities. For instance, the number of volunteer-related rewards increased when the city promoted a civic engagement campaign, and during the COVID pandemic new rules were rapidly added to penalize behaviors like not wearing a mask (–10) and reward participation in disease control efforts (+100).” [emphasis added]

Acting “more flexibly than the law” or acting “beyond the law” is thus demonstrated by the study and reinforced by this observation:

“67% of the political offenses involve petitioning local government — an activity legally allowed but often discouraged by local officials.”

Additional flexibility is evidenced by the fact that points change as policy changes.

Disturbingly:

“Unlike the legal system, which looks at intent and context, very different actions are treated as equal. For example, 300 hours of volunteer work (+50) can cancel out abusing a family member (–50).” [the “+50” and “-50” denotes the points given as reward or deducted as punishment]

The Stanford study concludes that:

“Meritown’s SCS reflects the discretionary judgments and priorities of local officials, often through vaguely defined indicators that allow for strategic ambiguity and administrative flexibility. This ambiguity, while enabling adaptable enforcement, raises concerns about legality, legitimacy, and bias. The system’s scoring method tends to disadvantage already marginalized groups, particularly rural residents. At the same time, government employees experience both privileged opportunities for credit accumulation and heightened internal surveillance, reflecting the dual role of the state in disciplining society and itself.” [emphasis added]

A China-maxxer’s self-incriminating view of the Stanford study

Ashley Dudarenok markets herself as a “globally recognized China digital authority and serial entrepreneur connecting global businesses with China’s dynamic market and its groundbreaking innovations.” It’s not an entirely neutral starting point, but is she a China-maxxer? After looking at a page on her website dedicated to explaining how China’s Social Credit System works, I have concluded that she is a China-maxxer, and here’s why.

Dudarenok seeks to paint the overall SCS as a system solely dedicated to monitoring financial creditworthiness and dealing with debt default, similar to credit scoring in Western economies. Thus she introduces the Chinese SCS as “aim[ing] to improve trust in transactions, enforce existing laws, and reduce fraud across sectors.” She does a very good job of sticking to this line until she runs into problems when describing restrictions imposed on supposed payment defaulters.

She says “they face restrictions on consumption beyond necessities”, and lists some of these restrictions, which relate to air travel, train travel, access to hotels and nightclubs, expensive schools for children, and so on. But surely any normal and proportionate system targeting financial defaulters should aim to address the default itself through recovery of the debt, as well as managing access to further credit to mitigate market risk?

Dudarenok runs into further problems when she acknowledges the existence of the Stanford Study and seeks to downplay its findings. She acknowledges one of the study’s findings that 66% of ‘offences’ that triggered points adjustments were already sanctionable under established legal codes. However, Dudarenok’s interpretation of this is: “the social credit system thus echoes existing enforcement rather than creating new offenses.” [emphasis added] This is a false statement since 34% of the offences were not covered by existing legal sanctions and therefore constitute new ‘offences’ created by the SCS outside of the existing legal framework.

She goes on to state that “severe infractions, such as political petitioning,… can result in immediate downgrading to lower credit levels.” However, the Stanford study notes that petitioning local government is “an activity legally allowed but often discouraged by local officials.” Dudarenok does not address this. She also does not address a study finding that 67% of political offences, a significant majority, involved petitioning local government, which is not an offence under the law.

Dudarenok seems confused since she does acknowledge that “the city’s system also demonstrates the discretionary and uneven nature of local social credit programs.”

Again, we get a sense that all is not well in China-maxxing world when Dudarenok discusses “social credit demonstration cities” where “local governments integrate credit into urban management—for example, awarding points for voluntary service and deducting points for littering or traffic offenses.” We’re back to fluffy phrases like “urban management”, and we’re firmly back in the territory of a reward-punishment system outside the formal criminal code. The China-maxxing narrative falls apart when Dudarenok acknowledges that “many of these experiments have been criticized for being overly punitive or intrusive.” [emphasis added] She goes on to say: “Wenzhou and Rongcheng reformed their programs in response to public backlash, with the central government emphasizing voluntary participation and reward-oriented incentives.”

There really is no denying, even on the part of China-maxxers, that, while we can argue about its scale, there is an SCS operating in China since the discourse evidences a systematic points system that goes beyond the existing criminal legal code. It may still be a work in progress, and there is some recorded resistance owing to its “intrusive”, and somewhat arbitrary, nature. It is also clearly not transparent since Dudarenok acknowledges under a heading “Legal Uncertainty and Due Process Concerns” that “Some individuals learn of restrictions only when attempting to travel or complete transactions.” And again, Dudarenok’s highlighting of “legal scholars advocat[ing] for standard notification templates, accessible appeals, and expedited delisting after compliance” emphasises the absence of due process.

Under a heading “Overlap with Morality and ‘Civilized City’ Campaigns”, we are informed that “specific local pilots blurred the line between legal compliance and moral behavior, assigning points for courtesy or community participation.” Why not simply maintain a transparent and clear criminal code within the existing legal framework?

The bottom line seems to me that if you are a China-maxxer trying to explain that China’s Social Credit System is not really a social credit system, you are already on the back foot since the clue to its true nature lies in the first two words of its name – social credit. Even the Chinese government does not deny that it is attempting to manage social behaviour outside the existing criminal code.

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In Part II, I’ll look at some evidence for: SCS activity relating to policing online ‘disinformation’; Corporate Social Credit Systems (CSCS), and; how the suppression of Xinjiang’s Uyghurs accelerated the Chinese surveillance state. I’ll also tackle weighing up extreme claims and counter claims in trying to decipher the truth about the SCS. I’ll then wrap up with concluding remarks.

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^[i] Iain Davis’s definition of China-maxxing is helpful: “the clear shift in Western media and social media narratives away from blanket vilification of China and its government toward uncritical promotion of Chinese government initiatives.”

^[ii] Josh Chin and Liza Lin, Surveillance State: Inside China’s Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control, 2022, St Martin’s Press, USA, Pg. 220.

^[iii] Josh Chin and Liza Lin, Surveillance State: Inside China’s Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control, 2022, St Martin’s Press, USA, Pg. 220.

^[iv] Josh Chin and Liza Lin, Surveillance State: Inside China’s Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control, 2022, St Martin’s Press, USA, Pg. 222.

^[v] Creemers, Rogier, China’s Social Credit System: An Evolving Practice of Control, May 9, 2018. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3175792 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3175792

^[vi] Creemers, Rogier, China’s Social Credit System: An Evolving Practice of Control, May 9, 2018. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3175792 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3175792

^[vii] Mitchell Gallagher, The digital panopticon: China’s Social Credit System and the postmodern surveillance state, 2026. Available at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17427665261458112

^[viii] Mitchell Gallagher, The digital panopticon: China’s Social Credit System and the postmodern surveillance state, 2026. Available at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17427665261458112

^[ix] Creemers, Rogier, China’s Social Credit System: An Evolving Practice of Control, May 9, 2018. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3175792 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3175792

^[x] Gamification is the practice of adding game-like elements such as points, badges, and progress bars to non-game activities. Its purpose is to achieve desired behavioural outcomes by manipulating the natural desire for achievement and competition.

^[xi] Creemers, Rogier, China’s Social Credit System: An Evolving Practice of Control, May 9, 2018. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3175792 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3175792

^[xii] https://sccei.fsi.stanford.edu/china-briefs/assessing-chinas-national-model-social-credit-system

^[xiii] https://fsi9-prod.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/2025-08/trusting_by_numbers_7.15.25.pdf